Today VMware has publicly announced the integration of Horizon Cloud with Microsoft Azure. As you may know, Horizon Cloud is available in two deployment models today; on-premises or cloud hosted. On-premises deployments take advantage of what was formely known as Project Enzo, where hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can be deployed in your own data centers, but leveraging the cloud control plane which is managed by VMware and hosted with IBM SoftLayer. The other option is to deploy desktops to a fully managed Horizon Cloud where you don’t need to host any infrastructure of your own in order to manage the virtual desktops or applications.

Available in the second half of 2017, we will now have the option to host desktops with Azure. This is another leap for VMware’s cross-cloud strategy, and it allows customers to take advantage of Microsofts massive data center footprint. This also means customers can split their deployments between on-premises and the public cloud.

I have been fortunate enough to have been working closely with our EUC R&D team and spent some time with them to understand the key components and architecture behind this new announcement. I am sure in the coming months we’ll be releasing more information, and stay tuned for VMworld!

As usual for this time of year I’m excited to be making my final preparations for VMworld Europe (Barcelona) and I thought I’d try something new and host a group discussion about using Horizon 6 with RDS Hosted Applications and Desktops. If you are interested in taking part then make sure to register for EUC3330-GD using the VMworld schedule builder. As the title suggests, being a group discussion means that this will be interactive and give you the opportunity to not only hear from myself on VMware Horizon 6 and RDS best practices, but hear from partners and customers on their implementations and experiences.

VMware doesn’t currently maintain an official Horizon 6 or View Configuration Maximums document, unlike the vSphere configuration maximums PDF which is has existed for many years. There are some maximum configurations in the Horizon 6 official documentation, and release notes but this does not include everything. Before diving into the configuration maximums below, let me first explain how they are derived. Many of the configuration maximums come from testing by developers at VMware and part of the Quality Assurance (QA) process before a product is released to GA (General Availability). These are what you’ll find in the product release notes or architecture guides. Other configuration maximums are derived from best practices, benchmark tests, and observations from many implementations and tests in the real world.

A configuration maximum that has caused some confusion over recent years in the number of linked clone virtual machines per datastore/LUN. For VMware View 5.1 and prior this was documented as a maximum of 64 linked clones per LUN (VMFS). Since View 5.2 this increased to 128 linked clones per VMFS datastore, and 140 if VAAI is enabled. Today with Horizon 6 this guidance hasn’t changed and this is reflected in the maximums below. If you refer to the Storage Sizing Guide for Windows 7 for View 5.2, page 6, you will see it is also stated there (in case you doubt!). [Read more…] about VMware Horizon 6 View Configuration Maximums

Since VMware Horizon View 5.2 there has been support for Microsoft Lync 2013. In fact when I say ‘support’, I mean that both Microsoft and VMware have both developed the architecture that provides a great user experience. Prior to Horizon View 5.2 only VOIP phones were supported and there were bandwidth constraints that made this unviable and resulted in a poor experience for end users.

If you’re not already running Horizon View 5.3… why not? Since Horizon View 5.3 was released VMware have already extended it’s functionality again with Feature Pack 1. If you’re not familiar with Feature Packs, they’re essentially shiny new updates and features to the core product release. These can be updates to View clients (E.g. iOS, Android, Windows) or the View server functionality itself. Anyway, the topic of this post is troubleshooting as I’ve seen some instances where the Feature Pack installation fails.

Horizon View 5.3 Feature Pack 1 provides the following features and updates:

In addition Unity Touch, HTML Access and RTAV are extended to support Windows Server 2008 and Windows 8.1, although HTML access is Tech Preview for Windows 8 or 8.1.

Troubleshooting

I’ve noticed that a few people have had issues installing the Feature Pack which may be due to the customization of the Windows 7 virtual desktop master image. Firstly, if you followed the VMware View Optimization Guide for Windows 7 then you may have disabled some Windows services that are required by the Feature Pack. Once such service is “Desktop Window Manager Session Manager (UxSms)” which is a required component for Windows 7 MMR. If this is disabled then you will get the following error: “Error 1920.Service Desktop Window Manager Session Manager (UxSms) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.”

If you don’t want to use all of the Feature Pack components listed above then you can choose not to install one or more, so if you don’t use Windows 7 MMR then simply deselect it during the Feature Pack 1 installation. Otherwise, enable the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager services (set to Automatic) and the Feature Pack will install. This service allows for Aero, 3D effects and high resolution support.

Note: This service is always on with Windows 8 and cannot be disabled.

If you have problems installing other components then check that required services are not disabled, or there are no restrictions in place preventing the VMware virtual Webcam or Audio drivers from being installed.